Breaking the Surface (37 page)

Besides dancing, there was karaoke, a roving magician, and a woman reading tarot cards downstairs in the workout room. With all of the people and so much going on, I should have been exhausted, but being there with all of them was invigorating.

The energized feeling I got from the party didn’t last. Within a few days I sank back into my usual deep depression, and over the next few months, as my health got worse, so did the depression.

Kathy had me take multiple lab tests to find out why I was losing weight. Everything came back negative, and she suggested that I needed to have a sigmoidoscopy and possibly a colonoscopy. Kathy wanted me to have the tests done in Florida, where John practiced, because in Florida it would be easier to keep the whole thing confidential. But I didn’t want to go for any more tests. I didn’t care enough to make the effort, and I wasn’t all that sick.

A couple of times they put me on a drug called Flagyl for intestinal parasites. It’s the same drug that’s sometimes prescribed for people who pick up a persistent intestinal bug from drinking the water in countries like Mexico. Flagyl is disgusting. It makes everything taste metallic, so nothing tastes good. Even a glass of water tastes like liquefied tin. It’s disgusting on your teeth. It’s disgusting going down. It’s just disgusting. I lost even more weight at a time when I was supposed to be trying to put weight on.

The one thing you absolutely have to stay away from when you are on Flagyl is alcohol. You can’t have anything that has even a hint of alcohol in it, because it can make you vomit. One time, just a couple of days after I stopped taking Flagyl, I was in Florida at dinner with John and his wife, Stephanie. John asked me if I wanted a glass of wine with dinner and I said that I’d better not, because I didn’t want to take a chance. Then I went and ordered spaghetti with clam sauce. It didn’t occur to me that the sauce had wine in it.

I’d only eaten about half of my dinner before I started sweating profusely and salivating. I was very nauseated. I excused myself from the table, went to the rest room, and had the dry heaves. I splashed some water on my face, took a few deep breaths, and made my way back to the table. That seemed to help, so I sat down and pretended that I was okay. It was one of those situations where you think you can get through it if you just stay focused on keeping your food down.

We got back to John’s house and talked for a while before I had to excuse myself. I still wasn’t feeling great when I got into bed. As soon as I put my head on the pillow, the room started spinning. I started salivating and sweating. I barely made it to the bathroom. It was awful.

Unfortunately, the Flagyl didn’t do any good and the symptoms got much worse. By late spring, I was getting diarrhea four to six times a day. But I still had an appetite, so I wasn’t losing that much weight. And I had this incredible craving for milk. I couldn’t seem to get enough of it. I didn’t think to tell my doctors about that, because it hadn’t occurred to me that might be a symptom of something. I also didn’t tell them that Megan thought I had systemic candida, which is a yeast infection.

By July, my appetite was gone, I’d dropped twenty pounds, and I’d started vomiting frequently. Around the same time I started developing fevers, which got as high as 104 degrees. Something was definitely going on and I was scared. The fevers started on a Thursday, and we had a wedding reception planned at the house for Saturday.

I talked with John, in Florida, and Kathy, and we decided that I’d fly to Florida and check in to a hospital down there for more tests. I agreed with Kathy that it would be much easier to keep my diagnosis secret in a Florida hospital than it would be in LA, where privacy is hard to come by. My goal was to hold on through the wedding reception and then leave on Sunday for Florida.

I flew down by myself and stayed briefly with John and his wife before checking in to a hospital in Boca Raton under the name Peter Cicero. I dressed up in humongous baggy pants and a very large T-shirt, hoping that people wouldn’t be gawking, “Oh, that’s Greg Louganis.” The whole effort was a little silly, especially because we didn’t go nearly far enough with the disguise. The nurses and the nursing staff knew who I was right away, but they were wonderful and maintained my privacy. The head nurse was very concerned and told me she wanted to know if anybody was out of line and how my treatment was going.

Even though my attitude wasn’t very positive when I first checked in, it was pretty clear to me that I wasn’t ready to die. It’s one thing to think about wanting to die and a whole other thing to be faced with the real possibility. With the attention I was getting from the nurses and the doctors, I began to think there was hope. But I was worried. The diarrhea was really bad, I had a lot of abdominal pain, and the fevers were pretty high. I wasn’t delirious, but I wasn’t dealing with a full deck, either. I was sweating a lot and getting the chills. First I would throw off the blankets, then I’d pull them back up, then I’d throw them off again.

Right away they hooked me up to an IV, because I was really dehydrated. John had arranged for two different specialists to see me. One was a gastroenterologist. The other was an immunologist. After examining me, they arranged for a colonoscopy. They wanted to have a look around my intestinal tract—apparently, around a lot of it; the tube was about six feet long.

Before they performed the test, they sedated me. I’m terrible under a sedative. I get very happy and romantic. I thought the doctor was kind of cute, so I looked at him goo-goo-eyed, grabbed his hand, and thanked him for being there. I really embarrassed myself.

The test showed that I didn’t have a systemic yeast infection, which had been Megan’s guess, I had intestinal histoplasmosis, a fungal infection. The doctors prescribed a course of intravenous treatment that was just awful. The medication was toxic, and I reacted badly to it. The infusions had to go in very slowly and took four hours or longer.

The first time they gave me the infusion, I went into shock. My temperature shot up and I was shivering violently and uncontrollably. They had to give me Demerol. This happened the second day, and the third day as well. After that, they figured out how to administer the drug without the bad side effects. They gave me Tylenol a half hour before the infusion, and halfway through the infusion I got a second dose.

This all sounds even more terrifying than it actually was, because the doctors did a good job keeping the pain in check with Percocet. I was in a relatively drugged and dreamy state despite everything.

After a week they discharged me from the hospital, by which time I was basically symptom-free. I was grateful to be out of the hospital. The whole experience had been frightening, both because I’d been sick and because it gave me a sense of what was likely to happen to me at some point in the future. I hope that’s the distant future, but HIV isn’t all that predictable, so you never know.

Once I got out of the hospital, I stayed with John and his family for another week and went for a few more treatments at his office. Then he gave me instructions to continue getting infusions of the medication on a periodic basis, which I was going to do at my doctor’s office in Los Angeles. I was also given a restricted diet designed to keep the infection under control. John also told me to drink lots of Ensure, which is a high-protein and high-calorie drink, to put some weight back on. He also told me to take it easy for a while.

From Florida I went up to New York to see a play that my manager wanted me to audition for. I started to realize that I wasn’t going to die right away after all, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to start thinking about working again.

I
FLEW TO
N
EW YORK
and went to see
Tony ’n’ Tina’s Wedding,
an improvisational play in which the audience is part of the show. It wasn’t for me.

But while I was in New York, I got to see a lot of other theater. One of the plays I liked the most was
Jeffrey,
a comedy by Paul Rudnick, about a gay man and his struggles finding a boyfriend in the age of AIDS. At the time I saw the show, the New York company was preparing to leave to mount a Los Angeles production. That meant they would be recasting the New York show, so I told my manager that if there was an opportunity to do it, I wanted to try out for the role of Darius. He’s a gay chorus boy who dances in
Cats,
the Broadway musical.

There was a lot about Darius that appealed to me: He’s an uncomplicated guy who’s very wise about life. He has a solid relationship with an older, well-to-do lover whom he’s devoted to, and he has AIDS. Darius gets to deliver what I think is the most important message of the play: “Hate AIDS, not life.”

I thought that playing Darius would give me the chance to face my own fears about AIDS and my own mortality. Onstage I would get to experience what it was like to have AIDS and have everyone know about it. In contrast to what I’d been doing hiding out in Malibu, I’d get to see what it was like to live life to its fullest to the very last minute. Five days before Darius dies, he’s marching on Fifth Avenue in the annual gay pride parade. I’d always wanted to march in one. Darius wasn’t afraid to live, which struck a very deep chord in me, because after my HIV diagnosis and after I stopped diving, I think I did become afraid to live.

My manager wanted me to try out for one of the two leads, but I didn’t want to. First of all, I didn’t think I was appropriate to play either of those roles. And second, I didn’t want to have to carry the show. Darius was the ideal part for me. And it turned out that Darius was exactly the role that the director, Christopher Ashley, wanted me to try out for.

They got me the script well in advance of the audition, and I worked on it and worked on it and worked on it. I flew to New York for the audition and worked with the director. Chris really challenged me. The one thing that I will say for myself is that I’ve always been coachable. I may not have good instincts initially, but I’m coachable.

It didn’t take them long to decide to give me the part. I had about a week and a half before I started, and in between I had to go home for a small role in
Mighty Ducks II
. So I went back to California, and the day after we finished shooting, I was back in New York to start work. I was both excited and nervous, especially because I was still recovering from my stay at the hospital. I’d lost about twenty-five pounds by that point, and I had to go out onstage in my underwear in the opening scene of the show. I drank as many cans of Ensure as I could, which wasn’t easy, because I didn’t have any appetite. As soon as I got to New York, I started going to the gym to try to build myself back up.

Not everyone thought it was such a great idea for me to do
Jeffrey
. Some of my friends were concerned that I would be so closely linked to a gay character that sponsors and potential sponsors would interpret it as a statement about my own sexuality. After what I’d just been through, I really didn’t care how being in
Jeffrey
would affect my marketability. Playing Darius was very important to me, and if that meant losing my contracts or hurting my prospects for future sponsors, I didn’t care. Who knew how much of a future I had anyway? All I knew was that this was a role I wanted to play and needed to play now. I’d deal with the future later.

My doctor had the loudest objections, because he was concerned about my health. He advised me against doing the show, and from where I sit now, that seems like very reasonable advice. But John also knew how important work was for me, so he didn’t forbid me from doing it. He knew that I’d do what I wanted anyway.

I was pretty scared getting ready to go onstage for the first time as Darius. It wasn’t that I was afraid of being onstage performing in front of an audience—that didn’t bother me—I was worried that I wouldn’t be worthy of the role, that I wouldn’t do justice to Paul Rudnick’s wonderful lines, that I wouldn’t be able to convey Darius’s message. It’s a very difficult subject—I had to die every night!—and I wasn’t confident that I was good enough to pull it off. As it turns out I really didn’t need to worry, because the reviews were wonderful.